Kept Alive in Arabic
Menelaus's Spherics
أُكَر مانالاوس
Menelaus wrote many books, of which only the Spherics, on the geometry of the sphere, survives; its Greek original is lost and it lives on in Arabic, from which it passed into Hebrew and Latin. It lays the foundation of spherical trigonometry, including the 'sector figure' on which astronomers built their calculations for centuries.
- Author
- Menelaus of Alexandria (c. AD 100; Arabic recensions by al-Mahani and Abu Nasr ibn 'Iraq)
- Field
- Mathematics
- What Arabic kept
- The whole book
- Greek title
- Σφαιρικά
- Arabic title
- كتاب الأُكَر
- Latin title
- Sphaericorum libri III (Halley, Oxford 1758)
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Sources
- MacTutor, «Menelaus of Alexandria» (University of St Andrews)
- Wikipedia, «Menelaus of Alexandria»: «Only the first of these, Sphaerica, survives today in Arabic translation»
- R. Rashed, A. Papadopoulos, Menelaus' Spherics: Early Translation and al-Māhānī / al-Harawī's Version (De Gruyter, Scientia Graeco-Arabica 21, 2017)
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